Mirrors (Ayana)

It's not just a metaphorical freeze, this time. The city has literally frozen.

Cars have been swept up in the massive tsunami that overwhelmed the once mighty city, overturned, and then frozen impossibly mid-crest as they started to come down.

People everywhere are dying. Those that aren't have fallen into unconsciousness.

And it's cold. Oh so very cold.

"Come on, come on," Inariko says, as she tries to warm up a small child even as she carries him to safety from the waters. She reaches the roof, and gently lays him down near a radiator.

From this vantage point, she can see it: the place where all that darkness is coalescing.

From this distance she shouldn't recognize the source, but she does.

"Saito-senpai," she breathes out quietly, and her eyes widen in pain, fear, and concern.

Inariko gives a quick glance to the boy, then bounds to the next rooftop. She leaps from there to a frozen crest, and from the crest to another building.

Every leap brings her closer. Physically, to Kunzite's laughing, overwhelmed body. Mentally, to an understanding she never had the opportunity to achieve before. Emotionally, to the feelings of despair that once overwhelmed her. Spiritually, to utter defeat.

By the fifth leap, she's close enough to make out the lines on his face.

Those aren't Kunehiro Saito's features, there. Sure, it's the same face, but that's not how he moves his mouth. That's not how he scrunches his eyes.

There's someone else there, now. Something ...else.

"Oh, Saito-senpai," Inariko says, falling to her knees as she stares up at him.

There's a sudden flare of ice, a flash of cleaver and a shower of glitter.

And then a world-refining brilliance, so bright it's nearly blinding.

When her vision clears, he's gone. There's no sign of the brilliant man she knew. The man who coddled her when she fled the dance with a broken heart. The man who guided her when rage and insanity nearly drove her to oblivion. The man who shielded her when on the brink of doom she gave in to despair. The man who quietly walked the perimiter as love broke through it all and saved her.

There's no sign of him, nor of the body that he once wore.

"SAITO-SENPAI!!!!" Inariko screams into the air.

But there's no one there to hear it.

And so she cries, clinging to herself in sadness. A sudden warmth washes over her, as Sailor Moon's escalation restores what Kunzite stole from Tokyo.

But for Inariko, the sadness remains.

Kunehiro Saito is gone. But not before giving her one last lesson: a distorted, amplified image of what she had become, before her friends saved her.